By twentieth-century American standards, or fourteenth-century Florentine standards, Filippo Villani, nephew of the more famous Giovanni Villani, was a successful man. As early as 1361 he held a chair of jurisprudence in the Studio at Florence, was appointed chancellor of the Commune of Perugia in 1377, which position he held for five or six years, and in the latter years of his life spent a very pleasant old age as public reader of Dante at Florence.

In addition to his public duties, he wrote in Latin and published in 1381-82 a work in two books on the history of Florence and the lives of her famous citizens, which gained the approval as well as the corrections and comments of the learned Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of the Commune of Florence. We may well imagine that Filippo, as a chronicler, following in the footsteps of his uncle Giovanni and his father Matteo, was infected by the brilliant revival of Latin letters set in motion by Petrarch and spurred on by Salutati.

In his now classic study of Italian vernacular and Latin pastoral Enrico Carrara briefly mentions the only eclogue of Naldo Naldi (1436-ca. 1513) known to him, a panegyric of Cosimo de' Medici expressed as a dialogue between two shepherds, Alpheus and Gnomon, stigmatizing it as pretty mediocre stuff; Vittorio Rossi is a great deal kinder, describing it as‘un’ egloga di temperato sapore classico, la migliore delle sue poesie’. Carrara based his opinion of Naldi's ability as a Latin eclogist on this single effort (one that the poet himself may have regretted), and might well have revised his estimate had he seen Naldi's best pastoral work, the ten other eclogues that appear in a manuscript (BN anc. fonds lat. 8389) rediscovered over twenty years ago in the Bibliothèque Nationale by Alice Hulubei and subsequently examined by her in a lengthy article.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry is at once a pleasure and a problem for the source hunter. Wyatt often translates direcdy from his source, but frequently he borrows no more than opening lines or stanzas, as in ‘O goodely hand’, where only the first three stanzas derive from Petrarch's sonnet ‘O bella man’, and the rest of the poem is either original or drawn from another source.

The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (abbreviated as CNRS) has so far published four books on the Renaissance, namely, Musique et Poésie au XVIe siècle, La Musique Instrumentale de la Renaissance, Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, and La Renaissance dans les Provinces du Nord (cf. RN ix, 211 f., and xi, 19 f. and 141 f). The editoris now preparing a fifth volume, dedicated to lute music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As in the case of the earlier publications the symposium on lute music will, in part, present to a wider public the papers read before a congress of scholars convened at Paris in September 1957. A list of these papers will be found at the end of this report, but it would be a mistake to file away the lute volume as another Kongressbericht, for it represents an effort to co-ordinate the work of individual scholars in a field of research where teamwork is sadly needed.